Arts & Culture

Living, reading, watching and listening Jewishly—that’s the crux of Moment’s Arts & Culture section. Here you can find book reviews, poetry, fiction, art and music. Don’t miss our fantastic interviews with artists and musicians.

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Robert Siegel interviews Zachary Leader

LISTEN: Robert Siegel Interviews Zachary Leader

Robert Siegel spoke with Zachary Leader, author of the new biography The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife, 1965-2005, at a bookstore in Washington, DC. Bellow “has fantastic mimetic powers, imaginative powers,” Leader says, “and he created a range of reference in his language that was new and more fairly American than the style of his predecessors.” Read the full interview from our latest issue here.

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Book Review | Hollywood’s Proud Zionist

The great French film director Jean-Luc Godard called Ben Hecht a “genius” who “invented 80 percent of what is used in Hollywood today.” Yet most modern American Jews have likely never heard of Hecht, despite his eminence as a playwright, best-selling novelist and screenwriter of a host of Hollywood film classics.

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Book Review | The American Jewish Identity Crisis Rages On

American Jews may not know their way around the Talmud or much about Jewish history, but they sure do excel at soul-searching and have for many, many years. In the late 19th century, in the mid-20th and again in our own day, taking the community’s pulse—and finding it weak and listless—has been a common pursuit and a constant refrain.

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Amos Oz, Beloved Israeli Author, Dies at 79

Famed Israeli author Amos Oz has passed away today, aged 79, after a short battle with cancer. Perhaps the most renowned Israeli author, Oz’s work has been translated into 45 languages and won dozens of awards, including the prestigious Goethe Prize and the Israel Prize for Literature. Oz was also an activist, repeatedly advocating in favor of the two-state solution and calling for peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

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